WHAT IS YOUR CORONARY RISK?

WHAT IS YOUR CORONARY RISK?

One out of three of us will die of coronary disease.  Over 15 million Americans have coronary disease, and the rate is rapidly rising.  How can we identify who has it and what causes it.

Sure high cholesterol and diabetes can inflame the coronary arteries.  Plaques can form, rupture, and hemorrage, and a heart attack will occur.  All of this results in atherosclerosis. 

A different apporoach was take by Samani.  He identifies chromosomal loci that are found in coronary disease.  He looks for sites not linked before with coronary disease, looking for unsuspected connections. 

Looking at the genotypes of 5000 people with coronary disease, he looked for an association of single nucleotide polymorphisms called SNP in patients with and without coronary disease.  There are over 3 billion pairs  of these in the human genome.

Four hundred of these pairs were significantly associated with coronary disease, and in particular three seem to contribute to overall coronary disease. The most common was on chromosome 9p211.3. 

The application of genetics to coronary disease seems to be on the cutting edge of intensity in this area.  This is the first unbiased scan of genome and sequence variants studied for this disease.

Looks like the emphasis in on the human genome identification of risks in all of us.  

But what do we do when we find we are at increased risk?

                  source NEJM 8.20.07

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